The dynamism of compassion, part deux

Compassion is the key.

(All the major religions) have come to this conclusion

not because it sounds good, it sounds nice, but because it works.

We are at our most creative when we’re ready to give ourselves away.

We are at our most sterile and dangerous when we seek to have ourselves and more so,

and to use religion to enhance our sense of ego.

--Karen Armstrong, to Krista Tippett

I listened today to a podcast of an interview done for the program Speaking of Faith--it resulted in a show entitled “The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong,” but what I heard was the unedited version, and it was terrific.

Karen Armstrong is a former nun, a religious historian/scholar, and currently leading the Charter for Compassion. I first heard of her 15 years ago or so when she was part of Bill Moyers’ Genesis discussion, and she struck me as a truly fresh voice, and won me with the line “Religion is at its best when it asks questions.”

That comment sparked a new chapter in my own faith life, and I’ve kept her work on my personal radar ever since. I recently linked to her TED video (which is related to her winning a TED prize for the idea of the Charter).I commend this interview to you; it’s available here. In it, she tells the story of her own journey through Roman Catholic religious life, through amused/bewildered atheism, to her present orientation as a person of faith not tied to a particular faith tradition--or, rather, lightly tethered to many and adept at finding their points of commonality.

The quote about compassion with which I opened this post captured my imagination today. The charity necessary for true compassion could be a truly powerful (holy!) force, were it fully unleashed in the world. She spoke of charity not in the sense of pity, which locates the charitable above the other, in the center; rather, charity is the force that gets us to willingly vacate the “center” position and put someone else there...to see the world through their eyes. Whether we like them or not. Whether we agree with them or not. Even if they drive us nuts. Even if they’ve done Bad Things.

This isn’t new thinking. What got me was her assessment that this kind of generosity of spirit is the most creative of forces. That sings somewhere deep in my soul.

She also discussed the Western/Christian tendency to be hung up on doctrine--to focus first on believing rightly--in contrast with the Eastern/Muslim/Jewish orientation toward living rightly as a path to the Divine.

(We do spend a lot of time and energy arguing, do we not, fellow Lutherans?)

What if, instead, we tried this (Karen’s quote, again):

If we do what Hillel says (do not do to others as you would not have done to you), if we lived by that, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute--and it’s no good going straight on to Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein when there are people in our own immediate entourage who we find difficult to get on with--the Buddha always said you have to radiate compassion to all four corners of the world, but you’ve got to deal first with the people who are right there around you: that difficult sibling, that annoying colleague, that rival, your ex-wife. (When) you can extend benevolence, wish them well, this starts to break down the hard shell of ego.

If, every time you attempted to say something horrible about one of these “enemies,” (you stopped to consider) how you would like it said about yourself or a loved one and refrained (from doing so)...in that moment, you would have achieved a transcendence of ego--and that would be a religious life, I think. Hillel was right to say that that’s the essence of religion; that’s the Torah, the rest is commentary. Confucius uttered a version of this golden rule 500 years before that; Buddha taught a version of it.

I think lots of things would change if we learned from our co-religionists instead of fearing them, judging them, and focusing on why they’re “wrong.” I think part of the reason we argue so much is that it’s substantially easier and more immediately gratifying than it would be to live in the simplicity of genuine compassion. We like to be right, and don’t want to spend more time with the Other than we absolutely have to.

I had a Zen class in seminary. The view of “what’s next” expressed in that class frightened me at the time--it was about attainment of enlightenment via complete emptying of the self (oooo...sounds like Jesus); about a "goal" of finally sort of being absorbed back into the web of life that hums all around and through us. This is a contrast with most of the funerals, most of the conversation about death I’ve been part of in the Christian world--you know, harps, clouds, lots of anthropomorphizing, a “reward” for a life well lived (yikes!).

What if this whole journey IS about breaking down ego, about emptying the self to find the Divine? What does that change in each of our lives?

What if we Christians took Jesus more seriously than Church/Tradition/Doctrine?

If we try to live our way into the answer via compassion as depicted above, it seems to me that we’d all be changed for the better, regardless of our dogmatic location.

Discuss.

The dynamism of compassion...

which demands intelligence, not just a gooey feeling" is Karen Armstrong's topic here. Excellent!

Outrageous peace and costly grace

Let us sing songs of

outrageous

peace.

--Susan Palo Cherwien

I got this extraordinary book of poetry about a month ago, after hearing some selections used as part of a gorgeous hymn festival sung by the choir in which Beloved and I met. I've since been savoring Susan's precise, vibrant wordsmithing...an extraordinary circumstance, as I tend to devour beautiful books.

I found the quote above at the end of one of the poems, and have been pondering it deep in my heart, marveling at the unlikeliness of that word pairing: outrageous peace. As is my wont, I looked at the prettiest definition most closely: "highly unusual, extravagant, remarkable."

And then I re-watched a movie tonight, and it brought me to a deeper, more difficult definition: "grossly offensive to the sense of right or decency."

The movie was Dead Man Walking. It came out in 1995, at the tail-end of my callow youth. I saw it through the eyes of a young woman, and took two things from it then: the conviction that the death penalty is wrong, and a deep admiration for Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ.

Tonight, it seems to me that Sr. Helen made outrageous peace. It deeply offended the parents whose children had died violently, violated, at the hands of the condemned man whom she was trying to counsel. It offended correctional workers, worried her mother, alienated others with whom she was working. It offended the condemned man, because she held a mirror in front of him.

And yet.

Her willingness to throw herself into the gaping maw of others' pain, to face head-on her own self-doubt, to claim unequivocally the love of Christ for all people, even society's "monsters..." This willingness of hers made outrageous peace: the condemned man faced his crime and asked for forgiveness. His family found a measure of dignity and comfort. A parent of one of his victims began to heal from his searing grief and got back on speaking terms with God. She made room for kindness within the coldest of human processes.

She made peace where there could not be peace; further, she made peace that offended people deeply. It seems to me I've heard about some of other guys who sang that song: Bonhoeffer. King. Mandela. Jesus. The song required everything of them.

It changed the world, with each of them...and the song of outrageous peace goes on.

I wonder I'll get to sing a verse...and if I'll be able to do so. I pray that I'll have the courage to lift my voice, if called upon.

The task of our generation

I was listening to a fascinating podcast of the most recent Bill Moyers Journal. His guest is Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun turned Islamic scholar and author of several bestsellers on religious themes (more info available here).

When she was researching her recent book The Bible: a Biography, a question formed in her mind: what if the Golden Rule were the lens used in interpreting scripture?

Well, this is one of the things that really intrigued me: how frequently the early rabbis, for example, in the Talmudic period, shortly after the death of Jesus, insisted that to any interpretation of scripture that read hatred or contempt for any single human being was illegitimate.

Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that when asked to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching, while he stood on one leg, said, "The Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. And everything else is only commentary. Now, go and study it."

St. Augustine said that scripture teaches nothing but charity. And if you come to a passage like the one you just read, that seems to preach hatred, you've got to give it an allegorical or metaphorical interpretation. And make it speak of charity.

Shades of Deuteronomy and the synoptic Gospels!

He answered,
‘You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart,
and with all your soul,
and with all your strength,
and with all your mind;
and your neighbor as yourself.’
--Luke 10:27

Last year she received the TED prize, which grants $100,000 and a wish. Karen's wish was for "help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion--crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule."

She's getting her wish. Check it out.

The task of our generation,
whether we are religious people
or secular people,
is to build a global community
where people of all persuasions
can live together
in peace and harmony.

--Karen Armstrong

Remembrance

From NPR's The Composer's Datebook:

On today's date in 1945 at 8:15 a.m., the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay released a solitary bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The first atomic bomb detonated in wartime killed the 80,000 inhabitants of that city in an instant, and another 140,000 deaths resulted from the effects of radiation in the months and years that followed. For years, the full horror of that split second of time seemed beyond depiction in musical form -- until in 1961, the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki finished a most unusual work for string orchestra.

Originally intended as an abstract exercise in extended string-playing techniques and the juxtaposition of chance and strictly determined musical forms, Penderecki originally had no title for the music he had created for 52 string players. He even considered giving the title "8 minutes, 37 seconds," his estimation of the piece's duration. It wasn't until he actually heard his music performed that he felt its intense emotion impact.

"I searched for associations," said Penderecki, "and, in the end, I decided to dedicate it to the Hiroshima victims." As "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima," this remarkable score rapidly made Penderecki famous worldwide.

I got curious after reading this. I went looking for the music, and there's a link to it below. If you have a few minutes, I encourage you to sit with it and listen. It sounds as if the world has come off its hinge, which must be how it felt to live through the Hiroshima blast. Stark, chaotic, painful; nowhere to really rest, ever.



I wonder what the legacy of the bomb has been to the survivors and their posterity. Surely there has been fallout beyond the radioactivity directly associated with the bomb. I was talking with a friend a couple of days ago about Noah and his family, after the flood...what that must have been like. About how Noah built himself a vineyard and used it to dull the pain of having survived that horror, when everyone else did not. If you don't know the story, his sons found him drunk and naked one day. Two sons covered him up and the third, Ham, took a closer look and mocked him. When Noah sobered up, he cursed Ham's firstborn son, Canaan, making him and his father servants of Shem and Japeth, Ham's brothers.

Poor Canaan. What the heck did HE do to deserve that?

The sins of the parents. They're visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation, according to Exodus. I always heard this as a completely confusing, unjust pronouncement from God. But as I've gotten older, I hear it instead as a description, God saying to us, "This is big, you guys. This is going to leave a mark. It'll mess you up for a long time--and not just you, but those who come after you. Healing from this is going to take generations." For any child of violence, alcoholism, abuse, the legacy is clear and painful.

So, on this anniversary of the most violent single act in all of human history, let's take a moment to remember and to resolve to leave a different legacy to the next generation in any small way that we can.

Peace, friends. Be good to one another.

What are you made of?

There are three people on my staff at church (I'm the music director): one is organist, the other two nurture our youth and children's worship program. I'm grateful for them all today, as well as our lovely preacher; worship was full of grace. The kids' choir sang all the verses of "Children of the Heavenly Father" as their anthem and there was not a dry eye in the house. It's not the sentimental aspect that's most important here (though it's impossible to ignore the way music functions as connective tissue with our dearly departed), but that those kids will have this idea in their heads for the rest of their lives:

Children of the heavenly Father
safely in his bosom gather
nestling bird nor star in heaven
such a refuge ne'er was given.

It's been a difficult week; many of my loved ones have been in dark moods--a lot of hurt feelings and anger in the aftermath of one person's unkindness and rather bad behavior. Weirdly, that's the story of both my workplaces this week. People are upset and sort of shocked, I think, at a surprisingly deep level. There is a way in which each situation suggests that something is acutely wrong in our shared orbits. Unnerving. It's easy, at that point, to want God to intervene and just, well, fix it, which leads to a very short slide into theodicy--"Why doesn't God DO something about this? People are getting hurt here, and it's so unjust--how can a loving, just God STAND it?"

Actually, I don't believe God can stand injustice. And I think that God feels the pain along with us whenever we hurt one another. But that doesn't mean that God just jumps in and rearranges the furniture of our lives; that's for us to do. And so we're given the chance to participate in God's grace.

Though he giveth or he taketh
God his children ne'er forsaketh;
his the loving purpose solely
to preserve them, pure and holy.

My thanks to the furniture movers in both of these places, who have acted with grace and good sense in the face of the attempted unmaking of grace. Blessed are you who create peace in your midst (thank you, Velveteen Rabbi, for that translation from the Hebrew!). It's a mark of God's grace that the peacemakers are present with us even as we have to work through our own very human cycles of grief, anger, and hurt...into the place from which it's possible to move back into the light.

In the children's sermon today, the kids were asked what they'd like to ask Jesus if he were standing in front of them. My favorite question became the title for this post--it's delicious! A little girl wanted to ask Jesus, "What are you made of?" What indeed...if this weekend's experiences (deep conversation with a wise friend on Friday, a hilarious dinner with new friends last night, and this morning's worship service) are representative of Christ, I know the answer, or at least part of it.

Neither life nor death shall ever
from the Lord his children sever;
unto them his grace he showeth,
and their sorrows all he knoweth.

What is Jesus made of?
Grace made human...again and again and again.

All God's children

“At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.” --Barbara Brown Taylor

I know and love a number of people who have Church Issues. They've been badly used or disenfranchised by the church in a variety of ways:

• declared or brushed off as unwelcome, due to their homosexuality/politics/family status/ insert-your-random-circumstance-here
• burned out by deep involvement, or generally smacked around by church politics and infighting
• were only loosely connected to begin with, and are Seriously Turned Off by the press coverage, heavily focused on polarizing social issues
  

Many of these friends have expressed open wonderment at my desire for engagement with the church. And I don't necessarily have any all-encompassing answer for them, except that I'm a baptized member of the body of Christ. For me, this means that these are my people, for better or worse.

Also, if I just shrug off what's wrong with the church, I cede that part of it to those with whom I disagree, and nothing ever changes. Sometimes we have to learn to live together within the space between two disparate points of view or modes of behavior.

More importantly, though, I recognize what's right with the church--this is my family, and I love them. They have offered me care and connection and a context in which to do the work that I so love to do. Also, I can't remember who said this originally, but "you can develop everything you ever need all by yourself... except for character." We need each other on a very basic level.

Today, I'm angry with one of my brothers in my congregation, but he is my brother. We disagree about a number of things, but I'm working hard to remember that he is my brother. Once I'm calm enough to talk with him, it's my hope that we'll both be better for having to work out our differences in the context of the community. Humility is absolutely necessary in order to live together faithfully; narcissism is an impossible modus operandi for the baptized.

For now, as I'm living inside the tension, I'll keep on praying for the wits and grace to live in a way that honors this belief. :-)